A Baseball Fortune

Have you been to a Major League Baseball lately? Gosh, it pretty much takes the entire GDP of Denmark to pay for everything. It’s pretty much highway robbery with how high the prices are. No wonder there is that growing separation between the average fan and the big, corporate world of pro baseball franchises.
And something needs to be down. The average Joe shouldn’t have to spend an entire week’s paycheck to take the family out to the ballgame. So “The Grandeur” is going to bring you several ideas to bring prices back down and make baseball games an activity that is considered a splurge. Power to the People!
First, let’s look at parking. If you go to a game where you have to drive and then park, you’re paying $9 just to get you car through the gate. A fee to sit you car on pavement that’s already been laid? Cheap shot.
Now let’s continue our journey into the gate. You want to be able to see a few baseball games in your lifetime not sitting in the upper deck. You actually want to be able to read the numbers on the back of the jerseys. But to get tickets within 50 rows of the field and in the infield, you dishing out $35 a pop. And now where at the point where everything is multiplied by four since you have your lovely wife Lucy and your two charming kiddos Johnny and Lizzie. So now it’s $140 dollars just to see the game.
Of course, it’s humanly impossible to survive without food and fluids. Hotdog: $5.00; pop: $3.50; peanuts: $4.00. Multiply times four again and there is another $50. And let’s you have a long week at work and really want to relax with a nice cold one. Yeah, that beer is going to cost you $8.00. You can brew your own for less than that.
And it’s pretty hard to go home without a souvenir so you have to get a ballcap. At $18 apiece there’s another $72 tacked on to the bill.
Ok, let’s review our spending. Parking, tickets, refreshments and souvenirs: that’s comes out to a total cost of, hold on to a stadium seat, $279. I did the math for just in case you weren’t keeping score. Of course, if you wanted to keep score at the game, a program is going to cost $5. That now brings our total cost to $284. You could mow all the fields at your Little League park and still not have money to afford the game.
Ok, now that we’ve seen the problem, let’s work on the solution. First of all, get rid of the parking prices, it’s just a low blow.
We can bring down the prices of food and drinks with good, healthy dose of capitalism. At a ballgame, the vendors are all working for the same guy. There is no competition to keep prices low. It’s neo-communism. Teams should allow separate business to come in and setup shop to compete with each other. One guy wants to charge $8 for a beer, then the next guy is going to make a fortune only charging $3. And to help the teams make up for the lost revenue, the businesses pays them a lease price to operate in the stadium.
And ticket prices can be slashed with a little pay cut. If everyone in the organization gave up 10% of their salary, tickets prices would get cut in half. A guy that is making $20 million a year is now only going to make $18 million. I don’t think it’s going to cause him to foreclose on his house. And if every player, coach, executive and whoever else decided to give a little bit back to the fans who support them then fans would be able to go to a game without having to have a garage sale every other week.
See, now were all starting to work together. The fans supports the team and the team supports the fan. It’s that kind of teamwork that everyone wants to see. Now, we just need to challenge a team to do this. Just imagine if a team decided to make the best seats in the house on $15, a hotdog a $1.50, a cap $10 and a beer $2. The fans would go crazy and want to come to more games, they would start selling out. And all the other teams around the league would like the bunch of greedy punks they are. So let’s hope that there is an owner out there who is willing to go where no one else is gone. A place where he put aside is own personal checkbook and supports the fans that support him.